The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved is a novel by Joey Comeau, a reworking of his novel Bible Camp Bloodbath.

Plot:
Martin’s mother is a make-up artist who particularly enjoys working on horror movies. Since those are not jobs that come along very often, when she gets the chance to work on one during the summer, the question arises where Martin is supposed to stay in the meantime. Through a few coincidences he ends up at Bible Camp. Which could have been fun, if the priest running it hadn’t gone completely insane and started killing children.

TSIEaWANYS is your classic slasher movie, only in book form. It’s funny, well written and a quick read with really nice characters. If you always wanted to read a horror movie, it’s perfect.

I really loved the relationship Martin had with his mother. It’s unconventional and in every other story it would have been portrayed as a completely disfunctional relationship, with the mother not taking proper care of Martin. But Comeau decided to show how the relationship works, despite not having the classic mother-son dynamic. Not everything works, of course, but there’s no relationship where everything works anyway.

I also extremely enjoyed the letters Martin’s mother writes him at camp. They were atmospheric and creepy and I really wasn’t sure how much of it to take literally, at least at first, which put in another level of tension.

Of course a novel like this is basically contractually obligated to provide us with a whole lot of horror movie references and Comeau definitely delivers on that and sprinkles a bit of meta in there as well, which is always appreciated. The only thing I didn’t like so much was [SPOILER] that there was a final girl. I mean, I know that this is a classic trope and that this book features a whole lot of classic tropes but it’s just one I’m rather tired of. [/SPOILER]

But other than that I enjoyed the hell out of this.

Summarizing: If you like horror, you’ll love this.